A tragic loss of boredom

The story goes that young Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), bored during a church service in the cathedral of Pisa, observed the swaying of a lamp suspended from the ceiling and wondered whether its oscillations would be the same for small, medium, and large arcs. Using his own pulse to time the movements, he concluded that a pendulum can be used to measure time, and went on to make scientific breakthroughs in the regularity of natural laws.

It never would have happened if he had had his cellphone. The needful conditions of boredom for generating creativity would have been absent. He would have whipped that device out faster than you can say Mamma mia, to fend off being alone with his thoughts, and scrolled through mindless clickbait on the antics of the 16th-century Kardashians.

Our phone has given us a constant stream of information. One thing it hasn’t given us is boredom. What if that was a costly bargain? A priceless forfeiture? What if it turns out that downtime from the fire hose of infinite data is necessary for good thinking, and for good life?

God says to Daniel regarding “the last days” that it will be a time when “many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase” (Daniel 12:4). But what quality knowledge? Why do we assume it will be good quality knowledge, and that the running to and fro is an improvement?

I’m on this because in Brooklyn my daughter handed me Catherine Price’s How To Break Up With Your Phone, which she bought multiple copies of. It starts: “Dear Phone, I still remember the first time we met. You were an expensive new gadget available only through AT&T; I was a person who could recite her best friends’ phone numbers from memory.” The book goes on to describe a romance that was full of first-night tingles but has become a universally acknowledged problem.

The next morning, waiting for a subway to Penn Station, I peered down the long platform of patrons bound for Manhattan, and each was siloed in his and her own space, head bowed and staring at a screen. I suddenly understood the Matrix (1999) imagery of the harvesting of imprisoned human bodies hooked up like so many batteries to supply energy for invisible masters. In place of real lives, the unwitting power sources are kept benumbed in a computer-generated dreamworld, never suspecting the truth of their condition.

“You are a slave, Neo,” explains Morpheus, leader of the righteous rebellion, to a man who has long suspected something amiss. “Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch.”

Who precisely benefits from our infatuation with the screen? The dopamine labs creating code for app companies to hack our brains; the social media titans who make us think we are the customers when we are actually the product. The casualty is your brain, whose very structure undergoes alterations in the circuits that support your mental functions, and which loses memory and cognition capacity.

There seems to be the notion that what cannot be quantified is not real: “What my net can’t catch ain’t fish,” we think. The mother you see at the playground, on her phone the whole time, thinking she is getting away with it; the father double-tasking, pushing baby’s stroller while he gets his phone calls answered—a bill is coming due for lacks of their attentive eyes and soft-sung lullabies. As sleep is crucial to the living organism, though we understand not how, so interludes of quietness of mind are given up at our great peril.

The first thing, as with any bondage, is to admit the problem. AA’s first step, therefore, is: “We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol [name your bondage]—that our lives had become unmanageable” (Alcoholics Anonymous, Step 1). That step taken, we proceed to the second: “We came to be aware that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

That would be Christ’s power. Through Him we may be intentional, set up our own guidelines—maybe banish our devices from beside the bed and dust off an alarm clock in its stead; maybe keep our cellphones in our pockets at the playground, in a basket by the door at Christmas dinner; maybe do a cleansing fast from time to time for one whole day.

A day is coming when the world will be so hooked up that “no one will be able to buy or sell” without it (Revelation 13:17). What exactly that will look like who can tell, but its contours are taking shape before our eyes. We refuse and we resolve: All things are permissible for me, but I will not be controlled by anything (1 Corinthians 6:12).